SmartPaani is 4 years old now!! And within this period, we have been able to crunch a good number of installations. As facts and figures tell the story, it is 109homes, 25schools, 80 institutions plus counting who have been benefitted with our systems. Having a good source of water for fulfilling their water demand is everyone’s right! Right? But how many of us do actually have this right? In context of the whole world, more than 660million people of the world are deprived of clean drinking water!!-That’s more than the population of United States, let alone Nepal! With these numbers ever increasing how can we contribute to lessen them?
Benefiting only Kathmandu denizens is definitely not where we want to limit ourselves, so we have started the initiative go outside capital city by identifying entrepreneurs who have the skill and ability to conduct business on their own and benefit their local community with sustainable water management systems. These are our franchise also addressed as Urban Nodal Points (UNPs). Since only identification will not be sufficient we understand that we have to train them, equip them with necessary skills and then let them explore into their market. Keeping these things in consideration SmartPaani conducted training for its entrepreneurs in two phases, spread over a period of 6 months. The first round of training was held in June and the final training was held in December.
So, whom did we train?? Till date we have identified five SmartPaani franchise: Dharan, Pokhara, Surkhet, Makwanpur and Butwal. Out of which Dharan, Pokhara and Surkhet have been trained and are now all set to hit their local markets and grow their businesses.
So, on what areas did we train them? As we know in order to run any kind of business one should have knowledge regarding market, product, operations, financials and. Thus a detailed workshop incorporating all these topics were given to UNPs where relevant marketing tools, business ideas, handouts, financial models were also provided along with exercises and case-studies. Moreover, to give a real experience of what we actually do, hands on technical tools were provided where the participants were involved in making our rainwater and biosand systems. Field visits at locations where our system have been installed were done on the final day which even helped to clarify the queries on the part of trainees.
Moreover, these kind of trainings equip the UNPs with the required knowledge to face the market and the inquiries they may receive during the business transaction phase.
As rightly quoted by Queen Elizabeth II, “It’s all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you’re properly trained”, now that we have equipped our franchisee with required skills and abilities to run a business, we hope we can affect and impact lives of more Nepalese citizens by providing them with sustainable eco-friendly water management solutions at their doorsteps.
-Subhechha Manandhar